The place for people crazy about analysis of international judo competitions, players & techniques.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Top 10 Noteworthy Things @ 2015 Astana World Championships

Top 10 Lists are always fun so here are the Top 10 things that were noteworthy at the 2015 Astana World Judo Championships (not in any order of merit)

1. There is still nobody who can fight Teddy Riner.

2. An unprecedented number of top champions (male and female) fell in the preliminary rounds, with quite a few in their very first fights!

3. Russia, the top performing country in the 2012 London Olympic Games judo competition, performed very poorly, coming in at No. 8 in the medal hauls (behind Argentina, Slovenia and Kazakhstan). Russia has roughly a year to remedy the situation before the 2016 Rio Olympics.

4. The IJF is clamping down hard on waki-gatame. It used to be very lax in the
past and there were far too many cases of players getting away with this very dangerous and very
illegal technique. A couple of top
players got hansoku-make for it.

5. Drop sode-tsuri-komi-goshi has been a regular fixture in international judo for some time now, especially amongst Cuban women. But it's only now that the rest of the world seems to have caught up with its potential and many players were doing it.

6. Reverse seoi-nage is still very much a South Korean phenomenon. There were a few Europeans and a few Japanese using it occasionally but it was the South Koreans who persisted with it. This is not surprising as it originated in South Korea.

7. There has been a steady rise in the number of players who do ura-nage. Ura-nage used to be largely an East European phenomena but today players from around the world -- even in developing judo countries -- are using this once-rare technique.

8. There were lots of attempts at tomoe-nage. Very few succeeded. Looks like it was primarily used as a means to look busy and avoid shido.

9. There were also many successful te-waza (hand techniques) that were used to take an opponent down. In all these cases it was a perfect example of using your opponent's strength and momentum against them.

10. Judo is really physical chess and many matches were won tactically. If you rely purely on throwing
abilities, it’s really not enough to win a gold medal unless you are Shohei Ono.